A photographer puts you face-to-face with sharks, by swimming uncaged

Doug Bierend, WIRED

Updated 12:00 PM ET, Tue January 6, 2015

A photographer puts you face-to-face with sharks, by swimming uncaged6 photos

Swimming with sharks – Cage-free shark photographer Michael Muller is taking over Discovery Channel's Instagram for Shark Week 2014. He hopes to use the opportunity to raise awareness about the declining populations of sharks.

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A photographer puts you face-to-face with sharks, by swimming uncaged6 photos

Swimming with sharks – "BLUESTEEL"

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A photographer puts you face-to-face with sharks, by swimming uncaged6 photos

Swimming with sharks – "It's all about light. Whether In the studio or 40ft below the surface, it all boils down to light. Can't tell you how fulfilling it is to light these babies up. Now just need to put the spotlight on shark finning and ending it or at least regulating it."

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A photographer puts you face-to-face with sharks, by swimming uncaged6 photos

Swimming with sharks – "While I love shooting all these actors, this is what occupies my mind in between shots. Shooting in 103 degree heat helps make this moment come to mind as well," Muller says on his Instagram feed.

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A photographer puts you face-to-face with sharks, by swimming uncaged6 photos

Swimming with sharks – "I've been surrounded by 150 to 200 sharks, not once ever been been close to being bitten."

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A photographer puts you face-to-face with sharks, by swimming uncaged6 photos

Swimming with sharks – Muller says of sharks: "100 million a year are killed people ... We gotta do what we can to put a stop to this or our ocean's fragile eco system is going to end up with just jellyfish."

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Story highlights

Cage-free shark photographer Michael Muller takes close up images of great whites

Muller is known for using studio techniques to shoot in the wild

He hopes his images will raise awareness about dwindling shark populations

(CNN)Photographer Michael Muller is a man without fear. He swims among sharks without the protection of a cage to make studio-quality, intimate photos of these beautiful creatures. As scary as that might sound, the top predators are at the bottom of his list of concerns. He's usually far more concerned about all the gear he brings into the water.

"The sharks don't really pose any of the danger. It's all the diving, and the technical [challenges] and electricity and the light," Muller says. "I don't use cages -- I've been surrounded by 150 to 200 sharks, not once ever been close to being bitten."

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Using studio techniques in the wild has helped Muller's work stand out in a crowded field of nature photographers. It bolsters the attention he's received as a commercial photographer, a spotlight he's leveraging to raise awareness about critically diminishing global shark populations.

This week his shark photos are being featured on the Instagram blog as he takes over Discovery Channel's account for Shark Week. He'll be uploading images from his own feed as well as posting new pictures from Mexico, where he's currently swimming with whale sharks. Both venues are helping broadcast his pictures -- and his message -- to an enormous audience.

Because of threats like overfishing and a high demand for fins, "the sharks are really in a lot of danger right now," he says. "We're killing about 100 million of them a year. People have no idea when they hear the numbers, and they're the top of a very, very fragile ecosystem in the oceans, so if you take out the top predator it's just like a domino effect."

I thought OK, I've done $10 billion in movie posters, maybe I can help sort of change people's perceptions of these animals and what's happening to our planet.

Michael Muller, photographer

"White Mike" as he's sometimes called, says his highly successful commercial work has helped him see the power of photography, but rather than promote celebrities or products, he's using his skills to help advocacy organizations like WildAid, Sea Shepherds, EarthEcho, and Shark Spotters in South Africa.

"I thought OK, I've done $10 billion in movie posters, maybe I can help sort of change people's perceptions of these animals and what's happening to our planet," he says.

As any professional photographer must be these days, Muller is also something of an entrepreneur. In addition to owning the patent on the seven-bulb, 1200-watt lighting rig he uses to illuminate the sharks, he's developed a photo toning app and is busy helping establish an online photography school. He says he's also got a number of books in the works, based on his photos of sharks.

Photographers strive to make images that connect with viewers, and the skills needed to do that are universal, whether under water or on land. A sense for composition, timing, and more than anything, patience will produce powerful images of a shark as surely as anything else. Muller hopes the connections his images forge will motivate people to think beyond their preconceptions about sharks. Ultimately, the global conversation will have to shift so people don't see these animals simply as a source of fins, or animals to be hunted for sport, but instead as the magnificent mainstays of a vast and delicate ecosystem that they really are.

"In order to get those changes you need people from within those cultures to come out and take a stand, which they're starting to do," he says. "Our generation I don't really have a lot of hope for," he says. "It's for the next generation [that needs to] fix what we've done and what we're leaving them."